My new year's resolution

When I write things down, I commit them to memory and to heart. I make the words true, for if I do not, I would have lied to myself and to lie is to be unjust. So, here goes.

My new year's resolution is to stop thinking about other people. Selfish people have it so much easier. I do not know why I even bother. From now on, I will think only for myself, for every single time I do otherwise, I only end up hurt. I will not care about other people's feelings for, anyway, most of the time, all they care about are their feelings. Why bother, really. Why bother.

"At the end of the day, shit. With that mighty word, you can console yourself for all human miseries, so I enjoy repeating it: shit, shit."
-- From Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

A short sojourn

Today we drove to Intramuros for a mini tour and for the most part had a lovely time. The sun wasn't too bright, the cobbled walks were pretty, and the La Pieta replica at the Manila Cathedral was enthralling. Some buildings in Old Manila, however, were terribly restored and still some others merely feigned antiquity. A few blocks from the Cathedral, too, the sidewalks were desecrated with garbage and reeked profusely.





But a walk in Intramuros is a walk of nostalgia. And so, as when we are leafing through the pages of our memory, we trekked only the paths which led to those which were beautiful.

Today was sort of a run-through for a 2-day trip we're planning this Christmas break. We intend to make a documentary film of it.

I'm quite excited. :)

According to Woody

The things that make his life worth living:

Groucho Marx, to name one thing; and Wilie Mays; and the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony; and Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Potato Head Blues”; Swedish movies, naturally; “A Sentimental Education,” by Flaubert; Marlon Brando; Frank Sinatra; those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne; the crabs at Sam Wo’s; Tracy’s face…

Now, my turn. The things that make my life worth living:

A Moveable Feast; Fitzgerald's short stories; watercolor; Paris; pastel-colored pastries; Woody Allen's movies, of course; classic Hollywood films; notes from my students, Moon River; lavender essential oil; flowers, and tons of them; Ice's curls

My Paris

Christmas

This year, I am determined to celebrate Christmas. Consider me in for the long haul: the mass on the 25th, the secret Santas, the Christmas movie marathons, the puto bumbongs and bibingkas, and the walks along Bellarmine field when the trees are brilliant with tiny stars.



In the collage, from left to right:
1. Above our table at Sweet Inspirations: branches adorned with mistletoe, berries, lights, and pretty drops of glass
2. At home, a Christmas corner: branches and berries of silver glitter, porcelain Santas (presents from my good friend Rache and the owner of an antique shop we used to frequent)
3. At home, gold and silver balls hang from the chandelier
4. An early Christmas present from Ice: an antique oak writing desk gives home to a stack of post-its and note pads from a student and Lia, a bear coin bank from Zia, a pot of paintbrushes and charcoal pencils, canisters of watercolor and acrylic paint and other craft materials, a silver coaster in need of polish, and Peter Mayle's French Lessons (the first of his books that I have read)

The auteur

Just recently, Ice gave me a video recorder. It is compact, the size of the average touch-screen cellphone, and costs around five thousand pesos. Now the minuscule size and cheapness are usually signs of dilettantism, but the gadget, in fact, boasts of high definition pictures. Aptly dubbed The Explorer, it is also shockproof and waterproof. Of course, such features are of no import to a person with a mélange of nature-related phobias like me. Still, I was over the moon.

When I was in college and still engulfed in romanticism, I decided I was going to be a filmmaker, but that delusion is now, very clearly, down the drain. I do not have a good eye for framing, I am certain, nor the patience for writing a two-hour long script. Nonetheless, the prospect of once again trying my amateur hand at the craft delights me endlessly. I already have plans for two shorts lined up: one a la Woody Allen, where neurotic geniuses will talk incredibly fast and dramatically gesticulate like there is no tomorrow, and one a la Jean Pierre Jeunet, which, if done properly, should look like a fairy tale. Yesterday, I shot a couple of scenes with Ice the actor and in one of my innumerable close-up shots, I saw in his eyes that he violently regretted presenting me with the camera—and this from a man who is usually overflowing with equanimity. “If only I knew about the things she’d make me do.”

At Adarna

Yesterday, Ice and I drove to Adarna Restaurant at Kalayaan Street for lunch. Alas, de Botton speaks the truth: destinations are better in photographs, if only because when I travel, I take myself along with me.

And so, yesterday, confronted with a vintage full-length mirror nestled in a corner of the restaurant, I looked not at the intricate details on the wood but into the glass and at myself where stress had robbed a patch of hair from my forehead. The sight caused me great worry, and I struggled to immerse myself in my surroundings, which I was determined to enjoy. The place, I thought sadly, could be lit more dramatically. The background music, I also observed, did not quite match the ambiance exuded by Adarna's publicity photographs scattered on the web. The food, too, cradled in lovely china and artfully styled, looked better than they tasted-- and perhaps, I considered, this is because I am hardly a connoisseur of our local cuisine. The restaurant, after all, boasts of a topnotch kitchen staff. I, with my emotional baggage and predilections grossly incompatible with the restaurant's chef and interior decorator, had ruined the image of the quaint, cozy, and perfect little restaurant I had in my mind. Nonetheless, as de Botton consoles, my memory selects the finer points of my experiences, and soon I will remember only those which were beautiful.

Perhaps, in time, my remembrance of yesterday will look like this:



I will remember that the place was lit like so and that Ice ate away happily and that the adobo was just right.



This one, though, I know this happened for real.

S'wonderful, s'marvelous Paris

Alain de Botton, in The Art of Travel, in not so many words proclaims anticipation as the finest aspect of travel. Most of the time, he explains, our actual travel experiences do not live up to the supreme expectations our illimitable imaginations have set for us. Perhaps, this theory could explain why while our entire school is abuzz with the imminent Paris trip (I have, too often, found myself entering a classroom to witness my kids huddled over the foreign trip brochure, and outside, I cannot ignore that the hallways are adorned with an image that is all too familiar and close to my heart-- La Tour Eiffel), I am surprisingly sane.

Too often have I fantasized about this scenario: the headmaster announces a trip to my beloved Paris, and teacher prefects are necessary. I have, for countless times, pictured myself mustering all the audacity in the world and begging him to let me go. It is therefore very extraordinary that a few days ago, while staring at the Paris trip poster outside the principal's office, I found myself feeling absolutely nothing. And so I wondered about the absence of longing I have harbored for so many years, that seemingly irrepressible desire to pack my sketchpad and black turtlenecks in my bag and- even for a few days- live the life of an expatriate in the city of lights.

Perhaps, after more than a decade of being captive to Paris, I am, after all, not quite ready for the city. The Paris that I know is one that is perfect-- the one that is still home to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Sartre, where every dish is consumed with a glass of wine and melts like butter in one's mouth, where all girls dress like the models in Sofia Coppola's Miss Dior Cherie TV ad, where Bridget Bardot is perpetually crooning in the background, and where everyone is either a philosopher or an artist (or, perhaps, both). I want to go there to take long leisurely walks in the streets and to linger in its cafes to read Le Figaro and write my novel. If I go there now and experience a Paris not quite like what I have read and imagined, I will inevitably be shattered. That is the difficulty with life-long dreams, I suppose: they become more fantastical and unreachable everyday.

Perhaps, too, I have merely accepted the impossibility of my being chosen for the trip, and am just consoling myself with the thought that not going is my choice. Perhaps. I honestly, honestly do not know.

Look, Paris. Look at what you are doing to me!

Holiday

I have two long weekends coming up. What do you know! One will be spent on a leisurely drive to and a gluttonous food trip in Laguna with Ice and his buddies, while the other will be lovingly devoted to one or two of these activities:

1. Scouting for an impossibly cheap bookshelf and then refurbishing it
2. Making a BIG watercolor painting
3. Really writing
4. Plastic-covering my books
5. Finishing Tender is the Night
6. Scouring the bookstores for a lovely non-fiction read
7. Getting a massage

Just recently, a sweet, well-meaning colleague asked me how I intend to spend the coming holiday. When I told her I look forward to lolling in bed with my books, her eyes were inundated with pity. Perhaps it's time I give adventure a try. First, I must unglue my butt off this chair.

Finally.

The trick is to know what matters, most of all.

Finally, I can get back to building that library. :)

Exterminating ennui

The trick is to know when to stop and flee before you find yourself hopelessly engulfed and the fire in your soul irrevocably extinguished. The trick is to know in your core that you are not but a coward who withdraws at the slightest sign of a challenge, nor a spoiled brat who demands that life's every minutiae be filled with exuberance.

Parang nauupos na kandila

Supergeeks

I love my students! My girls are just adorable and my boys are absolute geeks. Yesterday, several of them wore Green Lantern shirts and one even donned a light-up ring in honor of the movie's premiere. They constantly debate over superheroes and supervillains and abhor the Transformers film franchise. I love them!

***
Watercolor from last weekend:

From the wisdom of Woody and the Greek

"Of all human weaknesses, obsession is the most dangerous, and the silliest!"
--Mighty Aphrodite, 1995

From "Human Happiness"

"When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after- as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day- the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which nothing know of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?"

--Blaise Pascal

*
Watercolors from the summer break:

Somewhere (2010)

I like it how, in Sofia Coppola's films, time is expansive. She lets the camera linger- the pole dancers spin until the man is lulled to sleep, the girl swims until she absolutely has to stop to catch her breath, leisurely tea parties are had underwater, long drives are long drives, and conversations are not condensed- that the audience cannot help but share in the characters' lethargy and boredom.


If I were to rank her movies:

1. Life Without Zoe
2. Virgin Suicides
3. Somewhere
4. Lost in Translation
5. Lick the Star
6. Marie Antoinette

My summer in books

After my final examination, to celebrate: Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York
Alone in Palawan: Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: Travels Across Small-Town America
At Work, to kill time: Anton Chekov's Short Stories
During Holy Week: DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (I am realizing only now how terribly inappropriate this is!), James Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief, and Through the Children's Gate continued

*

I have a dear friend who, every time she would feel hopelessly lugubrious or frustrated, would scream into the window of her 11th floor apartment at the top of her lungs. When she joins the rest of the world below afterward, she would be all smiles and sunshine again and no one would suspect a thing. When I first met her, I admired and envied her invincibility; when I found out that it was all but an appearance, I admired her even more. Here is a woman who manages to control her emotions long enough to keep everyone out of her throes.

The mean reds

Tonight, Ice told me that I'm the saddest person he knows. I indulge in more sadness than I am entitled, and spend more time sulking than people with bigger, actual predicaments. I know I'm hardly the happiest person in the world, but this still took me by surprise. I have always thought- and, yes, with gratitude- that other people have it worse than I do-- how come I am sadder than them?

It is possible, Ice said, that I am clinically depressed. Apparently, I somehow manage to transmogrify even the happiest of situations into an intense discussion about death. While I cannot help but acknowledge this obsession as true, I don't think I'm quite capable of explaining it just yet. All I know is that I feel for Ice. Imagine being with someone who constantly has a dark, ominous cloud over her head. I'm not sure he realizes what he has gotten himself into.

In Coron, Palawan

In the middle of my Palawan trip with friends, I found myself suddenly alone in a seaside restaurant by the hotel intent on occupying myself with Bill Bryson's rants about small-town America and a disappointing glass of fruit shake. Around me were foreigners who were alone, too, sipping their own fruit shakes, reading their own books and taking in the view of the sea, and I wondered about their reasons for being alone-- reasons which were probably very unlike mine. I struggled to blend in with these people and be unobtrusive and so I buried my nose deeper into my book, but I wondered about them. I thought about those who choose and are comfortable in their solitude, those who are in a strange land because their fear of the unfamiliar is thwarted by their irremediable desire to explore the new, and I realized that I cannot imagine myself in their shoes. Afterward, I went to the hotel's sun deck to lie on the hammock and read my book and it was lovely, but I knew that I cannot, all by myself, brave a new land and culture for the hammock. For now, at least.

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Bertolucci is a genius. I wonder how one conjures something so powerful.




Paul: It's me again.
Jeanne: It's over.
Paul: That's right. It's over and then it begins again.
Jeanne: What begins again? I don't understand anything anymore.
Paul: There's nothing to understand. We left the apartment, and now we begin and love all the rest of it.
Jeanne: The rest of it?
Paul: Yeah, listen. I'm 45. I'm a widower. I own a little hotel. It's kind of a dump, but not completely a flop house. Then I used to live on my luck and I got married, and my wife killed herself.

Brothers and sisters

I rarely have anything good to say about myself but ask me about my siblings and I'm the most immodest person in the world.

Let's see.

My youngest brother Nico is in the top 15 percent of this year's ACET passers and was admitted into the economics honors program. But he never studies! All he ever does is watch re-runs of FRIENDS with me and sleep. When he starts college this coming school year, I doubt he'll change his study habits-- but I can bet you he'll top his every class.

My little sister MM is just brilliant. She's freakishly good in math (ask her classmates!), and writes amazingly well, too. This afternoon, she let me read a short story she recently wrote and I was in utter awe-- such profundity, such insight into the human condition! I remember, when she was just a freshman in high school, she was set apart from the rest of the student body and given the excellence in creative writing award. I remember feeling like the biggest person in the room the day of the awarding. I remember thinking, "My freshman sister writes better than all of you. Yes, you, seniors!" She later went on to snag the excellence in filmmaking award, too. Now that she's in college, taking the same course I did, her professors constantly describe her as brilliant. I completely agree.

My brother Alec, who came after me, breezed through college and got into St. Luke's College of Medicine on scholarship just as easily. I don't think I have ever seen him study or bring a bag to school in his four years in Ateneo. What he did, actually, was party incessantly, and yet he was consistently a dean's lister.

My older brother Alvin is a genius in math. When we were much younger, he used to compute inhumanly large sums in his head for a pastime, and he always, always gets them right. He never studied, and yet he aced all his math exams. He's an excellent artist too, and is the best sketcher I know. The best I know.

My oldest brother Carlo is as passionate about learning as he is smart. He speaks French, Latin, Italian, and Spanish fluently. He was number one in his course when he graduated. He's a walking encyclopedia, you can ask him about any subject. Come on, try.

What's even more amazing about my siblings is that they are as kind as they are talented and smart. They have the biggest hearts I know, you wouldn't believe it. I envy them, yes, and terribly so. Often, I wonder why they are so talented and smart while I am hopelessly normal. Most of the time, though, I am just filled to the brim with pride for them. God could not have chosen a better set of people to shower with brilliance. When you meet them, I'm certain you'll agree.

Woody Allen Movie Checklist

29 out of 45. Midnight in Paris will make 30. Titles in bold are those I have already seen. TV movies are excluded from the list.:)

2010 You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
2009 Whatever Works
2008 Vicky Cristina Barcelona
2007 Cassandra's Dream
2006 Scoop
2005 Match Point
2004 Melinda and Melinda
2003 Anything Else
2002 Hollywood Ending
2001 The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
2000 Small Time Crooks
1999 Sweet and Lowdown
1998 Celebrity
1997 Deconstructing Harry
1996 Everyone Says I Love You
1995 Mighty Aphrodite
1994 Bullets Over Broadway
1993 Manhattan Murder Mystery
1992 Husbands and Wives
1991 Shadows and Fog
1990 Alice
1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors
1989 New York Stories (segment "Oedipus Wrecks")
1988 Another Woman
1987 September
1987 Radio Days
1986 Hannah and Her Sisters
1986 Meeting Woody Allen
1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo
1984 Broadway Danny Rose
1983 Zelig
1982 A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
1980 Stardust Memories
1979 Manhattan
1978 Interiors
1977 Annie Hall
1975 Love and Death
1973 Sleeper
1972 Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask
1972 Play It Again, Sam
1971 Bananas
1970 Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You
1969 Don't Drink the Water
1969 Take the Money and Run
1966 What's Up, Tiger Lily?
1965 What's New Pussycat

The Story of Oliver's Discharge

He liked to lose himself in the labyrinth of shelves where no one could see him, and there he would take his lunch. Yesterday it was a grilled cheese sandwich, which he nibbled slowly and leisurely, while flipping through Camus. He picked the philosophy section yesterday, and it was at precisely twelve o’clock in the afternoon that he took his sandwich from his bag and proceeded to eat.

At one, he glimpsed people pass by his shelf and eye his sandwich. They looked at his hand pointedly, and then at the crumbs circling his mouth. They tried to catch his eye and point to the sign that forbade eating in the library, but he continued to munch his sandwich until it was finished and he continued to flip through Camus until it was finished, and so they decided to leave muttering under their breaths.

At two in the afternoon yesterday, he sat yoga-style on the floor with a thermos of black coffee and flipped through Nietzsche. At three he plucked Sartre off the top shelf and lay down resting his head on a stack of de Beauviors, and at four he strolled back and forth the aisles with Heidegger and a bar of Mars. It was only when it was already five in the afternoon and the library was finally to close and the lady who was behind the desk told him that he absolutely had to go that he realized that he had, once again, forgotten to return to his work.

I said I will write

I have always found it most difficult to write when I am engulfed with emotions. The trick, I suppose, is to learn how to temper passion so that words may contain it, otherwise, feelings will remain unnameable and inexplicable. The trick is to learn how to temper, and not simply wait, for when I wait until my emotions have faded and fleeted away, I find that I cannot write about them still for I do not know them anymore.

Woohoo!

Two papers: done and done. Final exam was last Monday, I think I did relatively well. The other paper, I will work on at a leisurely pace, at the pace of a snail if you will, over the summer break, and only when I'm done basking in the Palawan sun.

Ah. Tonight I celebrated.

I cut myself a big piece of focaccia bread, slapped an inordinate amount of cream cheese on top, poured myself a glass of red wine, and sat down with Mr. Gopnik and his New York stories.

C'est la vie. :)

The sloth

The problem with me is that I like to waste my time. For hours, I obsess over what I call "art," only to tuck it away in a dog-eared brown envelope with pages of other "art" that look exactly like it, never to see daylight again. For hours, too, I agonize over three-sentence paragraphs, which, in the end, do not say anything. For weeks and weeks, I watch television shows over and over again out of sentimentality, because I do not like endings. Books, too, take forever to finish because I pause every paragraph or so to ruminate over every slight sign of profundity. I spend half the day daydreaming, and the other half telling people about it. For all I have I done so far is think, I have, in the end, accomplished nothing.

Snap out of it. Now, most of all!

What I learned #1

I learned that the beautiful is tedious.

I find that if anything is to be beautiful, it has to be intentional. It is because they are crafted painfully and painstakingly that art and literature possess sublimity. That a poem is not a word more or less, that the letters are positioned so, make a poem a poem. On the canvas every dot is thoughtfully planned-- what color, how big, and why? It is because they are not natural- not mere fruits of the stream of consciousness or the instincts of an effortlessly deft hand- that they are literature and art. For to create a thing of beauty is to go against one's every impulse and to push one's every limit. The artist's concern is to transcend his nature and play god. Art and literature cannot be natural. Beautiful things are beautiful because they are unhuman.

The trick is to extend yourself without snapping.

Imagine yourself a piece of freshly-made taffy, still warm and malleable. Imagine yourself being pulled at the sides. You find yourself stretched to thrice your size. You are folded in half, and then you are stretched again, and then you are much longer. Before you know it, you are all about the room, infecting everything with your sticky sweetness, leaving not a piece of furniture untouched. It's hard to imagine you started out so small, the size of two hands clasped.

The trick is to extend yourself while you are still warm. When you wait until you are hardened, at the faintest tug, you snap and shatter into smithereens.

A part of me actually thinks I can do this. :)

Hemingway's Paris

“How different it was when you were there.”—Ernest Hemingway

How do I even begin to describe A Moveable Feast? Being an incorrigible Francophile, I have sunk my teeth into countless memoirs about Paris, but none has ever come close to Ernest Hemingway’s. In 1956, the management of the Ritz Hotel in Paris communicated with Hemingway, who had long returned to the United States to retire, to claim two trunks that he had stored there since 1928. Inside the trunks were remnants from his expatriate life in Paris—pages and pages of fiction, books, old clothes, and his Paris memoirs. These long-forgotten friends from the past inspired him to work on what he called “The Paris Sketches,” and when the memoir was finally published posthumously in 1964, the world was in awe. No one had written more beautifully and truthfully about the fabled city before. Hemingway had claimed the city as his. From then on, all books about France will be judged- and often rejected- according to Hemingway’s Paris.

Hemingway once spoke of the City of Lights as a moveable feast. If one is fortunate enough, he says, to have lived in Paris when he was young, then its stays with him wherever he may go for the rest of his life. The city, in short, is magical. What his memoir does, I think, is allow Paris to go beyond its already transcendental nature—no longer does the reader need to experience living in Paris to carry it with him for the rest of his life; all he has to do is bury his nose in Hemingway’s stories about the hours he spent sipping coffee and carafes at the famed Closerie de Lilas, Sylvia Beach’s massive collection of books at the cozy Shakespeare and Company at the rue de l’Odeon, his incredibly odd museum tour with F.Scott Fitzgerald and intellectually-stimulating afternoon teas at Gertrude Stein’s, or his quaint little apartment which he and his wife had filled with pictures they loved, and he is there. The reader finds himself suddenly transported to halfway around the world. The reader finds, too, that the experience has irrevocably changed him. He finds that, like Hemingway, he will be, from then on, forever in love with Paris.

I have been thinking about what makes A Moveable Feast so special for quite a while now. The fact that it was written by literary genius and Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is, of course, a very cogent reason. Aside from the literariness of its writing, however, what makes the book unparalleled and timelessly beautiful is that, it is not simply a book about Paris—it is a book about a well-lived life. The reader takes a moonlit walk with Hemingway and his son or goes on a modest but happy picnic with his family and realizes that that is exactly the kind of life that he wants for himself. Of course, there is more to life than what Hemingway portrayed it to be. It is not all about carafes and happiness: Hemingway’s family later fell apart and, to the world’s utter dismay, he did go on to kill himself in 1961. But isn’t that the point of Paris? To be a city where simple pleasures like a walk on the Place St. Michel or a cup of cappuccino and not problems are the things that matter and are remembered? To be a city, which, like a dream, is suspended in time? Hemingway’s Paris is a place where one goes to forget and dream. And, true enough, every time I’m feeling a bit down, I sit in a corner, lay out the scrumptious feast that is Paris in front of me, and indulge. Everything just floats away. I am in Closerie de Lilas, and Hemingway is just a table away, oblivious to the world, scribbling away.

It is the sea pursues a habit of shores

Our MA class runs like a book club. What happens is, we all six of us sit around a rectangular table, take turns reading passages aloud, and then humbly essay interpretations. Some sessions are more fecund than others. Some nights we simply fill the hours-long silence with the perfunctory oohs and ahhs. Those nights, I feel incredibly unworthy and could not bear to look my professor in the eye. Last night, however, was a good night. Sir Pulan did a reading of Carlos Angeles' "Gabu," a poem about the violent sea. The sea thrashes and batters the shore, rendering it a pitiful shred of wasteland, and leaving an elemental wound, but also, with its every wave, loses something of its self to the shore-- the gift of salt. I have never felt a deeper connection to a poem. I mourned for the sea imprisoned in its eternal pining for the shore, judged for its rage and turbulence. Perhaps its violence is because of its irremediable passion and desperation to be one with the land. It was long before I realized that, as our professor chanted the words about the sea, I was swaying my hands gently, back and forth, like its helpless waves.

Gabu
by Carlos A. Angeles

The battering restlessness of the sea
Insists a tidal fury upon the beach
At Gabu, and its pure consistency
Havocs the wasteland hard within its reach.

Brutal the daylong bashing of its heart
Against the seascape where, for miles around,
Farther than sight itself, the rock-stones part
And drop into the elemental wound.

The waste of centuries is grey and dead
And neutral where the sea has beached its brine,
Where the split salt of its heart lies spread
Among the dark habiliments of Time.

The vital splendor misses. For here, here
At Gabu where the ageless tide recurs
All things forfeited are most loved and dear.

It is the sea pursues a habit of shores.